2005
Dream as Peter Berlin
Artefact: Reproduced interview in the Journal of the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation, number 18, Autumn 2005, to promote the exhibition ‘Berlin on Berlin’, 14 January - 25 February, 2006. Original interview by Robert W. Richards in 1982, published in Stallion magazine, 1983.
Here’s the thing
What to dream of
When you’re already
The dream itself?
Peter has a simple fantasy
Doesn’t see himself in it
Sees enough of himself in the waking world
Catches his reflection, perhaps
In slips of glass
As he cruises past
Second-skin leather
Hips, crotch, ass
Blond, long
Grazing the hungry eyes
Kissing the neck
But, just a quick slick of shapes
Momentary phantom
Not lingering to appreciate himself here
Back on the other side
He can stare at himself all day
This world
Hovering between ‘83
And the fifth year of the new millennium
Then, somewhere out into the future again
Twenty-twenty-two
Further still
Is an amalgam of familiar streets
Berlin, Rome, Paris
New York
San Francisco
The corners lurk and blur
Snapping into one another
A dim litter-strewn Straße behind the east station
Tipping abruptly into an alley right off Octavia
The circuit loops endlessly
Shimmers
Peter aware that it can all be destroyed in a second
Here, the boys
(Loose grouping term
Boys not meaning by now what you imagine boys to be, any longer)
Do whatever their feelings
Tell them to do
Yes
Exhales Peter
The boys
Deal in the physical
Have elevated sexuality up from seventh, eighth place
To prime position
Surface layer
And through to the core
No lies
Even when you peel off the wrapper
Dig down
This honesty
The articulation of how to be
Desired
And simultaneously
A demanding dream
Crackles inside every cell
Ripples on the skin
Goose-pimpled
Sheathed
Sliding in a shuck of oil
Bronzed, baked
Translucent
Birthmarked
Radiating jet glister
These impossiblities
Exist here
In the pattern of their fantasies
Living their days on the perpetual saunter
In this quite perfect new society
Complete
Happy
Real
What to dream of
When you’re already
The dream itself?
Peter has a simple fantasy
Doesn’t see himself in it
Sees enough of himself in the waking world
Catches his reflection, perhaps
In slips of glass
As he cruises past
Second-skin leather
Hips, crotch, ass
Blond, long
Grazing the hungry eyes
Kissing the neck
But, just a quick slick of shapes
Momentary phantom
Not lingering to appreciate himself here
Back on the other side
He can stare at himself all day
This world
Hovering between ‘83
And the fifth year of the new millennium
Then, somewhere out into the future again
Twenty-twenty-two
Further still
Is an amalgam of familiar streets
Berlin, Rome, Paris
New York
San Francisco
The corners lurk and blur
Snapping into one another
A dim litter-strewn Straße behind the east station
Tipping abruptly into an alley right off Octavia
The circuit loops endlessly
Shimmers
Peter aware that it can all be destroyed in a second
Here, the boys
(Loose grouping term
Boys not meaning by now what you imagine boys to be, any longer)
Do whatever their feelings
Tell them to do
Yes
Exhales Peter
The boys
Deal in the physical
Have elevated sexuality up from seventh, eighth place
To prime position
Surface layer
And through to the core
No lies
Even when you peel off the wrapper
Dig down
This honesty
The articulation of how to be
Desired
And simultaneously
A demanding dream
Crackles inside every cell
Ripples on the skin
Goose-pimpled
Sheathed
Sliding in a shuck of oil
Bronzed, baked
Translucent
Birthmarked
Radiating jet glister
These impossiblities
Exist here
In the pattern of their fantasies
Living their days on the perpetual saunter
In this quite perfect new society
Complete
Happy
Real